


Defining Terms

by lovetincture



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Missing Scene, Season/Series 02
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-31
Updated: 2020-12-31
Packaged: 2021-03-10 17:35:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,116
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28451013
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lovetincture/pseuds/lovetincture
Summary: Abigail and Hannibal share a meal and talk about accidents.
Relationships: Abigail Hobbs & Hannibal Lecter
Comments: 4
Kudos: 16





	Defining Terms

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [close the book](https://archiveofourown.org/works/12575668) by [cordialcount](https://archiveofourown.org/users/cordialcount/pseuds/cordialcount). 



> I'm not a person who tends to revisit fandoms, but I read this wonderful, haunting Abigail-centric fic by cordialcount and found an old prompt in my drafts folder, and now here we are.

Tonight, they’re having dinner. They often do, unless Hannibal is entertaining someone. Then Abigail hides in her room, quiet as a mouse. Sometimes she creeps down to the lower level on those nights, silent, stockinged feet keeping quiet as she waits, ear pressed to the banister to hear the rise and fall of familiar voices.

“Pork loin with a cranberry reduction. It’s seasonal at this time of year.”

“Festive,” Abigail says with a smile.

The meat is pale, almost white. It’s fanned out across the plate in thin slices, the deep red sauce cutting a drastic line across them. Looking at it, Abigail almost feels dizzy.

She starts with her vegetables, picking the stalks of broccoli rabe into her mouth one by one until they’re gone. She eyes the meat. Picks up the knife, and her hand slips.

“Oh,” she says, watching the blood bloom to the surface. She tilts her palm toward the light.

Hannibal stays seated, watching her. He doesn’t bolt out of his seat or cry out in alarm. It’s why Abigail likes him. It’s why she doesn’t.

“Why did you hurt yourself?” Hannibal asks, tilting his head to regard her face, the hole where her ear used to be, the pink scar along her throat, her weeping hand. Her body a constellation. “Was it on purpose?”

“No,” Abigail says. “Of course not. It was an accident.”

“But what’s an accident?”

That trips her up. The seconds stretch between them, long and sticky like taffy. It’s one thing to know intrinsically what a word means and another to be called upon to explain. Her dad used to say that if you couldn’t explain something to a ten-year-old, you didn’t really know it. She had been twelve at the time.

The saying had always made her angry. She didn’t know why she should be called upon to explain anything to someone who’d been here almost as long as she had.

She was glad she never had any siblings.

“An accident is anything you don’t do on purpose,” Abigail says finally. “It’s a mistake. It’s something you do by—” can’t say accident “—carelessness.”

Hannibal smiles at her. Not kindly, for what does a shark know about kindness, but softly. It stretches his face into something less severe. Something that looks, for just a moment, less dangerous. The effect is disheartening. Abigail likes knowing what’s true. It’s always safer to know what things are, rather than what they appear to be.

There’s a reason she’d loved her father. Felt comfortable with him even, after everything. There’s a reason Will Graham makes her feel so very uncomfortable.

She likes her knives to look like knives. She likes to know where the loaded guns are.

“You should be more careful,” Hannibal says. He leaves her sitting at the dining room table as he excuses himself into the other room.

She would like to get up. She grips the edge of the dark wood table instead, holding so tight that the tips of her fingers go white. She holds her wounded hand above the plate, making an effort to spare the clothes that Hannibal bought her. She doesn’t like the style—they’re too grown-up. They look like something that would belong to someone who isn’t her, someone who’s more like Doctor Bloom—but her mother raised her not to be rude, for all the good that did her. And anyway, she doesn’t like the smell.

Blood drips from the tip of her finger, thinner than it looks on TV. She’s always surprised by that—the way it pools like water. The way it flows and flows like it might never stop.

Well, that’s the thing, right? It does or it doesn’t.

Three fat droplets splatter onto her plate, dark ruby stark against bone china. It starts to run into the juices of her meat, staining the plate faintly pink. It takes a moment for the sting to set in, for the startled shock of a cut finger to signal pain in the appropriate ways.

Abigail doesn’t cry out. She sits with it, very still, absorbing the feeling. It’s insistent, the pain. A signal getting louder.

She hears the sharp click of Hannibal’s shoes against the hardwood floor before he reappears, a hollow sound announcing him down the hallway. He comes to her side with a first aid kit—not the cheap plastic kind from Walmart, the sort they’d kept beneath the sink in her old house. This is more like the industrial supplies she’d seen at Port Haven the time her roommate had taken the underwire of a bra to her own wrists.

“May I see your hand?” Hannibal asks.

Abigail feels like saying no, but she holds out her wrist instead. Hannibal presses a clean pad of gauze against her finger, hard enough to deepen the sting. She watches roses bloom through the weave of the cloth.

“Keep pressure on that,” he tells her, and she does, loosening her hand from where it’s sore around the dining table, where she’s left half-moon divots in the wood.

She presses the gauze into her finger with a numb hand, pinching tight to keep the blood inside.

They stay like that for a while. Abigail sits and Hannibal looms beside her. He’s patient in a way she finds unsettling. She fidgets in her seat, digging her nail into the pad of her cut finger for a little bit of interest. They don’t speak, and the silence feels awkward around her.

The dining room is very quiet. She wonders if anyone would hear her if she screamed.

“That should do it.” Hannibal holds out his hand, and Abigail gives hers back.

The gauze sticks to her finger a little when he peels it away. Her blood is bright against the white, the color of cherries. Or candy. Hannibal drags a square drenched in stinging antiseptic across her finger, and this time she hisses.

“You don’t need stitches,” he says.

“That’s good.”

He bandages her up with a smear of Neosporin. She thinks she should help clean up—it’s her blood, after all. Her accident, but he piles everything neatly back in the first aid kit with the ease that comes with practice. By the time she looks up from where she’s flexing her finger around the new bandage, all the traces of her are already gone.

Hannibal rejoins her, sitting opposite her at the other end of the table.

He smiles at her. It’s a face that doesn’t know kindness. He picks up his knife and fork and turns back to his meal.

“You should eat,” he says. “Your food is getting cold.”

Her finger stings as she picks up the knife.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm on [Twitter](http://twitter.com/lovetincture) and [Tumblr](http://lovetincture.tumblr.com).


End file.
